Terry Marotta: It’s all just self-expression

Monday

Once, young guys wore briefs and old guys wore boxers. Now it’s just the opposite: The young guys are in boxers, or boxer-briefs and the older guys are in what are now called tightie-whities.

Once, young guys wore briefs and old guys wore boxers. Now it’s just the opposite: The young guys are in boxers, or boxer-briefs and the older guys are in what are now called tightie-whities.

Customs change.

Once, it was mostly sailors on boozy shore-leave who got tattoos inked into their skin.

Now, even kids in marching band get them. Take 20-something Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO’s hit series “Girls,” who has numerous tattoos, some of them illustrations from the books she most loved as a child.

Not so long ago, girls were sauntering around with vast crescents of flesh showing between their tops and their trouser.

Now, as I just read in a fashion magazine, it’s considered less classy to do this, yet some girls still will, you know they will.

Once, all females over 12 wore white gloves upon venturing into the city.

I know I did. I wore white gloves WHILE HITCHHIKING between college campuses. I wore them to signify to the drivers whizzing past that I was a nice girl, which I was, of course. We were all nice girls and the world was as safe as a playpen, or so we thought.

I don’t think any of it is about shocking people. “This is who I am,” is all they are hoping to say.

I have a 20-something friend who dresses in a kilt when he’s of a mind to, and he certainly doesn’t do that to shock anyone. Yes, he studied the bagpipes once, but he’s also an Eagle Scout, a wilderness survival guy and an EMT. Oh, and the computer hasn’t been invented that he can’t get to sit up and beg. So try pigeonholing HIM, you know?

It was back in the mid-‘90s when our oldest child got a tattoo, and I can tell you that very few young women were doing that at the time, especially among the econ and religion majors there at Wellesley College.

As I recall, her dad had something to say when he heard about plans for this species of personal ornamentation.

“Well, you’ll never get a job in the corporate world!” he told her tartly.

“Oh, Dad, I’m not going into the corporate world!” I remember her grinning back. “I’m going to head up a federal agency!”

“But why is she DOING it?” this husband of mine said to me later.

We didn’t have the answer to that question until she came back from that trip with her best college pal Sarah and saw it. The tattoo that encircled her arm just above the elbow was the same daisy-chain pattern of the favorite ring of her grandmother, recently deceased.

She had carefully made a pen-and-ink sketch of it and brought it with her.

So she didn’t get a tattoo because of any fashion; she got it as a symbol of something important to her.

And anyway she DID join the corporate world, MBA in hand. And her pal Sarah is now in infectious disease doc at a prestigious Boston hospital.

So maybe we have to look at all fashions as means of significant personal expression.

My old 5-inch platform shoes betrayed my wish to be taller, to count for something in the world.

Or maybe my wish to sing like Elton.

Or maybe both.

Thoreau said it: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Write Terry at terrymarotta@verizon.net or PO Box 270 Winchester MA 01890. Pix and more stories at her blog Exit Only (www.terrymarotta.wordpress.com).

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